Felted Bison Runner Quilt

This quilt is created from an unfinished quilt top where the creator loved diagonals!  The textures and colors of her fabrics seem to come from mens shirts and her skirts. Newsprint, polk dots, and plaids make this piece dance. The long rectangular shape could serve as a table runner on a picnic table, along the back of a couch, or as a wall hanging. I rescue antique quilt tops that are not finished, and stitch them to warm soft bison wool that I gather and have felted at a local mill.  Together, my stitching  is joined with that of an unknown woman who pieced her quilt top over one hundred year ago.  It is a collaboration of creative energies spanning decades.  To quilt, women saved scraps of cloth from worn out shirts, dresses, and household linens. They kept left over material from sewing projects, and created a stash of fabrics to dig into and find inspiration.  What we know today is the same as yesterday, women have always been - busy.  They did not always get to finish their creative projects, and once abandoned, they were put into a box or to the back of a closet for a rainy day.  Rainy days came and went, and the project remained hidden away. Family found these quilt tops and let them go at auctions or estate sales.  Historically, the prints and fabrics tell a story.  How the woman who gathered them and placed them together was her own choice, or maybe she followed a traditional pattern, like Log Cabin, or Flying Geese.  By the stitching, that has held up over the years we, can see if she was careful, or maybe just easy going. I hope that wherever she is, she will be pleased that someone helped finish her quilt years later, and that she is as happy as I am that we have joined forces, and the quilt top has finally escaped the hidden darkness of a storage space. Felted bison blankets are  85% needle-felted bison fiber and 15% wool.  Machine and hand stitched.